New Afghan Rulers Impose Harsh Mores Of the Islamic Code

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In the four days since Kabul fell to the Taliban militias, the capital's one million people have been plunged into the medieval labyrinth that is Taliban rule.

Already a secretive six-man ruling council of Islamic clerics has reshaped the everyday lives of ordinary Afghans who, at least in Kabul, long enjoyed one of the most liberal ways of life of any Muslim community in Central Asia. Movie theaters have been closed, the Kabul television station has been shut down, the playing of all music banned.

A decree on Sunday from the new Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice ordered all men in government jobs to grow ''proper beards'' -- untrimmed ones -- within 45 days. Western-style suits are banned.

Women and girls have fared worse. Girls' schools have been closed while the clerics, known as mullahs, study the ''issue'' of education for females. Women with jobs have been told to stay at home, and ordered when venturing out to wear a full chaderi, a gown that covers a woman from head to toe, allowing her to see only through a tightly woven face mask.

On Sunday there were several instances reported in which Taliban fighters stopped women on Kabul streets and beat them, in one instance with a radio antenna ripped from a car, accusing them of not covering their entire bodies.

The mullahs, who have already imposed changes on the two-thirds of the country under Taliban control, are introducing the capital to sharia, the harsh Islamic criminal code that prescribes stoning to death for adulterers and drug traffickers, amputations of hands for thieves and flogging for the consumption of liquor.

At least one man has already been paraded through the city on a truck, his face blackened, a weight attached to his jaw to keep his mouth open, his left hand severed.

Still, the Taliban capture of the capital after a 22-month siege has brought a breath of relief to the people in Kabul. Before the dust storms blew up today, the morning sunlight showed the capital in a rare state, with residents moving about without fear of the long-range artillery that has killed at least 30,000 people and reduced much of the city to rubble.

And the voice of the city is changing, too, with people talking about the possibility of an end to the seemingly eternal civil war all across Afghanistan, something many Afghans have long said they would sacrifice almost anything to achieve.

The war began when the Afghan Communist underground seized power in Kabul in April 1978. In 1979, Soviet paratroops moved in to begin a decade-long occupation. After they pulled out, Najibullah, the Soviet-backed Afghan leader, retained power until 1992. Since then, he had been sheltered in a United Nations compound.

After the collapse of Communist rule in 1992, a jumble of guerrilla factions jostled for control of Afghanistan. Burhanuddin Rabbani, one of the faction leaders, became President in the Government's most recent incarnation.

The Islamic groups that succeeded Mr. Najibullah have been picked off one by one by the Taliban, a movement that sprung out of Islamic religious schools, or madrassahs, in 1994. With their victory at Kabul, the Taliban control 70 percent of the country and are fast closing in on the northern 30 percent, which is controlled by two ethnic militias.

Throughout the day today, Taliban fighters in Japanese pickup trucks were said to be pouring north toward the Salang Tunnel, a Soviet-built feature high in the Hindu Kush that is the last major barrier facing the Taliban before they confront the militias of Gen. Abdul-Rashid Doestam, an Uzbek, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik who was the military commander in the Kabul Government.

General Doestam, a former Communist commander, was reported to have rushed 2,000 troops to the northern end of the tunnel to stage a last-ditch battle for survival. He is said to fear the same fate as Mr. Najibullah.

On Thursday night, fleeing officials of the Rabbani Government offered to take Mr. Najibullah with them but he declined, apparently believing that the Taliban would not breach the United Nations compound. Taliban fighters dragged Mr. Najibullah from the compound at 1:30 A.M. on Friday, and had killed him by 4:30 A.M., United Nations officials said. He had been tortured and shot, and his mangled corpse was hanged alongside his brother's.

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It will be a long time before most people in Kabul can think of the Taliban without jarring recollections of the bloody way in which the fundamentalists introduced themselves to this war-shattered capital.

''Najibullah was a bad Afghan, and a very cruel man,'' said a man who was once a prisoner of the Communist secret police. ''But what the Taliban did to him was quite horrible, and now we must think about the kind of people they must be to do such a brutal thing. Maybe our lives now will be even more difficult.''

All across Kabul today, people lowered their voices when asked about the fate of Mr. Najibullah, who was as brutal a ruler as this harsh country has known, but who won grudging respect from many Afghans for his peaceful surrender to the council of former Muslim guerrilla leaders in 1992.

The stillness that came with the end of the fighting in the capital was compounded by an eerie emptiness in many streets, partly because most women stayed home and partly because there was a mass exodus to the north, said to have involved as many as 250,000 people, ahead of the Taliban's march into the city.

Traffic moving southward across the arid plain that separates Kabul from the Hindu Kush suggested that the exodus was reversing, but many shops remained shuttered.

One of the few busy spots was at the gates to the Arg Palace, once home to Afghan kings and, since Thursday, headquarters of the Taliban.

Hundreds of heavily bearded Taliban fighters carrying Kalashnikov rifles milled about, many of them southerners from the city of Kandahar, the original base for the Taliban.

Kabul residents who dare to talk about the Taliban often say the new rulers' harsh brand of Islam is a product of the walled-off mentality that has been characteristic of Kandahar for centuries.

Arabic lettering on the white Taliban flag fluttering atop the palace's clock tower spelled out the Taliban message. ''There is no God but Allah,'' it said, in the most sacred words of the Koran.

Another message came from the Soviet-built tank lurking behind the gates, its barrel festooned with paper flowers. The beggars who are one of the legacies of the war, many of them men missing legs, moved among the Taliban fighters, some distinguishable by white turbans of the kind favored by the ruling mullahs.

After two decades, many people appear to have decided that there is no choice but to go along with the mullahs, while reserving judgment on what their rule will bring.

In the bazaar that crowds along the banks of the Kabul River in the heart of the city, Abdul Jabbar, an 85-year-old pensioner who practiced law under the Afghan monarchy, approached a foreigner to practice what he said was English grown rusty during years of war.

''We are perhaps a little happy that the Taliban have come, because the fighting is ended,'' he said. ''But in future, we can only be happy if the Taliban do their work well. Everything is in the hands of Allah.''

A version of this article appears in print on October 1, 1996, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: New Afghan Rulers Impose Harsh Mores Of the Islamic Code. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe